I loved this movie and both my daughters loved it even more. It is AS GOOD as the first part, therefore this review follows the main lines of my review of the first "Despicable me". This review contains very limited SPOILERS.

1. Hilarity - Exactly as the first film, this sequel is HILARIOUS! There is hardly any 15 seconds in this movie that would not contain a really good gag, children or/and adult oriented. Whoever wrote the scenario was a genius!

2. Despicability - in this film Gru is a little bit different from what he was in the first part. He is no more so grumpy, mean, petty and permanently aggravated - he certainly smiles more and all his attitude softened. He remains however exactly as insecure as in the first film. That being said, there are moments in this film when the old Gru resurfaces, when his heart is broken or when somebody REALLY upsets him. His geriatric sidekick and only friend (well, kind of) doctor Nefario didn't take all this change easily and he has some trouble to adapt his evil laboratory to new tasks of producing jam and jelly... Gru's murderous (and toxic) dog/rat/wolverine/skunk like pet on another hand felt completely under the spell of the girls - but still gives a great show! The two "bad guys" are also excellent - which is a real achievement, considering that one of them belongs to species usually not associated with evil villainy...)))

3. Girl power - as in the previous film, I believe that any parent of little girls will fall immediately in love with Margo, Edith and Agnes, the three little orphaned sisters Gru adopted in the first part. Those seemingly defenseless creatures took him since under the sweet and soft but in the same time surprisingly totalitarian control little girls exercise over their fathers, adoptive or not...Read more ›

I thought it was impossible.but thjs is better than the first!It.s hysterically funny.touching and the special effects are unbelievable!Gru.once a villain himself.is recruited to catch a bad guy.He must balanxce this wirh caring for his 3 adopted daughters and watching over his unpredictable Minions!What's more is it's wholesome family fare.Movies this good are few and far betweenThis is a definite must!!!

The summer of 2013 will likely be remembered as a period of sequels for the computer generated animated feature film segment. Sure there are some original pieces sliding into the fray (Epic & Turbo for example) but the lion's share of the media attention falls squarely on Pixar's Monsters University, Universal Pictures'/ Illumination's Despicable Me 2 and already the trailers are beginning to circulate for Disney's third entry into the Cars universe: Planes.

Depending on who you are, the animated sequel thing can work- look at the Toy Stories and Shreks, Kung Fu Panda, Madagascars, and so on. That said, it didn't come as too much of a surprise when rumors started circulating a couple of years back that 2010's surprise breakaway hit about a villain turned good guy would be getting a direct sequel as well as a spin-off film featuring the minions a year after that.

That brings us to the sequel itself- Despicable Me 2 does away with fancy tag lines and usual sequel fluffery and drops its viewer quickly into a brief reprise of Gru's life as a former supervillain turned domestic daddy caring for three orphan girls. This time around we learn that his vast resources, technology and manpower (or Minion power as the case may be) are devoted to the business of producing a line of jellies and jams.

It doesn't take long for Gru's simple life of parenthood/ Smuckers wannabeism to come to a halt when Lucy Wilde, an agent representing the Anti-Villain League (AVL) abducts the baldheaded mastermind and takes him to a top secret meeting to plead for his assistance in solving a caper involving the disappearance of an Arctic laboratory responsible for the chemical agent PX-41.Read more ›

Actually, this review is of the theatrical performance of DESPICABLE ME 2. We hadn't planned on seeing it this weekend but we were running early at the multiplex and the next showing of MONSTERS U was full. Neither of us had seen D.M. 2's predecessor but it didn't matter once we caught onto the fact that the Minions are kind of like Gremlins or Ewoks except they have very little hair, there are tons of them, some have only one eye, and all of them love to go into costume. The plot has superspy overtones, as the formerly despicable main character Gru (voice of Steve Carrell) is shanghai'd by the international Anti-Villain League to find out who is about to enslave the world (the likely culprits have been winnowed down to the proprietors of the stores at the local shopping mall). Lucy, a way over-the-top near-novice girl spy (Kristen Wiig) joins our hero and at the beginning there is no love lost between them . . . but things develop. So what you have is basically a super-high-energy 98-minute animated feature that's part spy caper, part screwball comedy, part teen romance (Miranda Cosgrove returns as the eldest daughter), capped with the Minions singing a spirited version of the Village People's "Y.M.C.A." in Minion-ese. Benjamin Bratt as a macho restaurateur and Russell Brand as Dr. Nefario add to the fun. Rated PG, though I'm not sure why except there's some comic SPLAT-ing going on, and the Minions apparently think the word "bottom" is naughty. (One whispers the word to another, they both titter; then the children in the audience titter, followed by the adults. It's just that kind of movie.) Our showing ended with spontaneous audience applause, and the movie deserved it in my opinion. We awoke today to the news that D.M.2 is the top-ranked movie in America, and my partner went out in search of the disc version of D.M. (1) that includes extra Minion mini-features.